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Spiritual   /spˈɪrɪtʃəwəl/  /spˈɪrɪtʃwəl/   Listen
Spiritual

adjective
1.
Concerned with sacred matters or religion or the church.  Synonym: religious.  "A member of a religious order" , "Lords temporal and spiritual" , "Spiritual leaders" , "Spiritual songs"
2.
Concerned with or affecting the spirit or soul.  Synonym: unearthly.  "Spiritual fulfillment" , "Spiritual values" , "Unearthly love"
3.
Lacking material body or form or substance.  "The vital transcendental soul belonging to the spiritual realm"
4.
Resembling or characteristic of a phantom.  Synonyms: apparitional, ghostlike, ghostly, phantasmal, spectral.  "A phantasmal presence in the room" , "Spectral emanations" , "Spiritual tappings at a seance"



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"Spiritual" Quotes from Famous Books



... there, amidst the conflicts of reason and emotion, conscience and desire, spiritual forces were still conceived to exist. Cause and effect were not traceable when there was a free volition to disturb the connection. In all other things, from a given set of conditions the consequences necessarily ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... wits are allied to madness only inasmuch as they are possessed and carried away by their demon, While talent keeps him, as Paracelsus did, securely prisoned in the pommel of his sword. To the eye of genius, the veil of the spiritual world is ever rent asunder that it may perceive the ministers of good and evil who throng continually around it. No man of mere talent ever flung his ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... county; and that until they were given their freedom, the slaves were well cared for and kindly treated. They lived in comfortable cabins on the lands of their owners, well fed and clothed, given the rudiments of spiritual and educational training, necessary medical attention in sickness; and it was not unusual for some slave owners to give a slave his or her freedom as a reward for faithful or unusual services. If there was any of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Kentucky Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... all without admitting anything not strictly belonging to it. The foreground was now aflame with autumn colors, brown and purple and gold, ripe in the mellow sunshine; contrasting brightly with the deep, cobalt blue of the sky, and the black and gray, and pure, spiritual white of the rocks and glaciers. Down through the midst, the young Tuolumne was seen pouring from its crystal fountains, now resting in glassy pools as if changing back again into ice, now leaping in white cascades as if turning to snow; gliding right ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... the lonely statesman to compensate for the glorious empire he had lost,—such realms of lovely fancy; such worlds of exquisite emotion; that infinite which lies within the divine sphere that unites spiritual genius with human love? His own positive and earthly nature attained, for the first time, and as if for its own punishment, the comprehension of that loftier and more ethereal visitant from the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... sight, that the ecclesiastics belong to the first class, and that their encouragement, as well as that of lawyers and physicians, may safely be entrusted to the liberality of individuals, who are attached to their doctrines, and who find benefit or consolation from their spiritual ministry and assistance. Their industry and vigilance will, no doubt, be whetted by such an additional motive; and their skill in the profession, as well as their address in governing the minds of the people, must receive daily increase, from their ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... more desirous to confuse her senses and entrap her. She placed her enthusiastic eye to the window of the box. The Devil preluded with a few proverbs and wise saws, and unfolded to her view scenes of love, in which he led her fancy so adroitly from the spiritual to the carnal, that she was scarcely aware of the gradation. If she were about to turn away her eyes with shame, the offensive object changed itself at once into a sublime image, which again attracted her attention. Her cheeks glowed, and she believed ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger

... no want, no repining, while the heart is contented. Genius in her paused and slumbered: it had been as the ministrant of solitude: it was needed no more. If a woman loves deeply some one below her own grade in the mental and spiritual orders, how often we see that she unconsciously quits her own rank, comes meekly down to the level of the beloved, is afraid lest he should deem her the superior,—she who would not even be the equal. Nora knew no more that she had genius; she only ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... the Forum from which quotations have already been made, M. J. Savage states many facts which have a determinate bearing on the point now under consideration; namely, the intelligence manifested in the spiritual phenomena. From these we quote a few. He says (p. 452 ...
— Modern Spiritualism • Uriah Smith

... very jocose, sir. I will tell you, that a notary is to temporal affairs what a confessor is to spiritual ones; from his profession he ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... gentleness of his voice and manners, and—what was, naturally, not the least attraction—his marked kindness to myself. Being in mourning for his mother, the colour, as well of his dress, as of his glossy, curling, and picturesque hair, gave more effect to the pure, spiritual paleness of his features, in the expression of which, when he spoke, there was a perpetual play of lively thought, though melancholy was their habitual ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... of all the domestic arrangements, would have been to let her mind dwell on just what she had to avoid. She was sick to her very soul of all that the words "domestic arrangements" implied; sick with an actual spiritual nausea. It was honestly no exaggeration to say that she would gladly have died rather than take the trouble to arrange the details ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... gaze of the father Darley, seeking with all his soul to find a grain of holy comfort in the chaff of words, his conscience smote him. Had he nothing to say that should calm anger and revenge with spiritual power? no breath of the comforter to soothe repining into resignation? But again the discord between the laws of man and the laws of Christ stood before him; and he gave up the attempt to do more than he was ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... "Nothing about your material being, but a treatise upon your spiritual nature. I was reading an old school book that I found among my forgotten relics—a book about the Divinity of the ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings

... regions, at the cost of his royal estate, for the conversion of these peoples and the direction of those who are converted—are and have been occupied, with the utmost solicitude, in fulfilling their obligations and your Majesty's command by gathering rich fruits, both spiritual and temporal. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various

... and they sat them at the table in great reverence, and made their prayers. Then looked they, and saw a man that had all the signs of the passion of Jesu Christ, and he said: "My knights and my servants and my true children, which be come out of deadly life into spiritual life, I will now no longer hide me from you, but ye shall see now a part of my secrets and of my hid things; now hold and receive the high meat which ye ...
— Stories of King Arthur and His Knights - Retold from Malory's "Morte dArthur" • U. Waldo Cutler

... my spiritual birth, whilst I was enjoying a much-needed rest and reading a novel, everything in the room seemed suddenly to be obliterated from my view; I became oblivious of my surroundings and was apparently floating in an endless vista of soft, beautiful, ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts

... genius. "The production of beauty excuses any method, to my way of thinking." He spoke half to himself. "God knows," he added after a pause, "whatever I've done and been, I could never do or be again. Sometimes a man knows when he's reached the zenith of his spiritual development. I've reached mine. I think they're beginning to trust us," he added after another long interval, in which silently they contemplated the moving composition. Pete's tone had come back to its ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... as a book, but as a revelation; it may be the first realization of the extent and moment of what physical science has to teach us; it may be, like Carlyle's "Everlasting Yea," an ethical illumination, or spiritual like Augustine's or John Wesley's. But whatever it is, it brings with it new eyes, new powers of comprehension, and seems to reveal a treasury of latent and unsuspected talents in the mind and heart. The history of mankind has its parallels to these moments of illumination in the life of the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... hold as above price the purity and strength of your racial life. Better than we of Caucasian stock, you know that only so may all the values be fully realized which are to be Africa's contribution to the spiritual wealth of ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt

... the Reverend M. Macaire's solitary exploit as a spiritual swindler: as MAITRE Macaire in the courts of law, as avocat, avoue—in a humbler capacity even, as a prisoner at the bar, he distinguishes himself greatly, as may be imagined. On one occasion we find the learned ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... prostitute this highest interest of home either at the altar of mammon or of fashion! The precious time and talents with which God has entrusted them, they squander away in things of folly and of sin, leaving their children to grow up in spiritual ignorance and wickedness, while they resort to balls and theaters and masquerades, in pursuit ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... gathered around the board, for it promised to be an interesting one, and attracted even spectators who were not familiar with the game. The old women, however, surrounded the curate in order to converse with him about spiritual matters, but Fray Salvi apparently did not consider the place and time appropriate, for he gave vague answers and his sad, rather bored, looks wandered in all ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... Jordan. What His baptism meant to Him is symbolized by the account of a vision which He saw, and a Voice which designated Him as Son of GOD. He became conscious of a religious mission, and was at first tempted to interpret His mission in an unworthy way, to seek to promote spiritual ends by temporal compromises, or to impress men's minds by an appeal to mystery or miracle. He rejected the temptation, and proclaimed simply GOD and His Kingdom. He is said to have healed the sick and to have wrought other "signs and ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson

... its reputation for intellectuality with a spiritual discussion on "Has Life a Double Meaning?" or "Is Existence a Joke?"—the exact title has not yet been decided. "Constant Reader" has already bought a penny packet of assorted stationery and charged it to the office petty cash, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various

... beliefs of his age has always remained. In this, as in other things, he prefigures the character of the Renaissance, that movement in [7] which, in various ways, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought, not opposed to but only beyond and independent of the spiritual system then actually realised. The opposition into which Abelard is thrown, which gives its colour to his career, which breaks his soul to pieces, is a no less subtle opposition than that between the merely professional, ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... on the conditions therein stated. I largely participate the "peculiar pleasure" afforded by the consideration of the unanimity of the Society, and entertain an humble hope that, with the continuance of this harmony, we may long continue to enjoy all spiritual blessings in ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston

... cousin," I said. "And I have been looking after his lambs for him. I would there was some spiritual shepherd who would look after us. We have not heard mass since Christmas." (For we had ridden over to Standon on ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... conversation that left the neutral ground he took. But now, when the eccentric and sceptical Mr. Hogarth had crowned all this sins by an act of such injustice to his nieces, and they were in affliction from bereavement and poverty, he wished to give them spiritual comfort, and to teach them something that he knew had been omitted in their education; but he couched his consolation in language that seemed strangely unfamiliar to the girls he addressed, and when he spoke of crosses to be borne, that God has ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... foot, fluttering and purring, as if endowed with affection for its unlovable master. None so mastered the missile; but for all his weird influence over it, he was subject to the restraints of another weapon which seldom left his hands. Is there not a spiritual law which imposes checks on the bombastic tricks of crude and cultured alike, or was it by force of gravity that the point of the dwarf's long and slender spear dipped into the ground, punctuating mock martial ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... taxes, and denied not only the right of parliament to impose the latter on the colonies, but also the justice, equity, policy and expediency of exercising that right. Accordingly, while it was declared that the King, by and with the consent of the Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons of Great Britain in parliament assembled, had, have, and of right ought to have, full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain, in ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... last, a symbolist. There he is related to the Dutch Seer, Rembrandt; both men strove to seek for the eternal correspondence of things material and spiritual; both sought to bring into harmony the dissonance of flesh and the spirit. Both succeeded, each in his own way—though we need not couple their efforts on the technical side. Rembrandt was a prophet. There is more of the reflective poet in Carriere. He is a mystic. His mothers, his children, are ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... in their accustomed places of public worship which shall occur after notice of this proclamation shall have been received, they especially acknowledge and render thanks to our Heavenly Father for these inestimable blessings, that they then and there implore spiritual consolation in behalf of all who have been brought into affliction by the casualties and calamities of sedition and civil war, and that they reverently invoke the divine guidance for our national counsels, to the end that they may speedily ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... teacher, Dr. Stanton Coit, complains, like Houston Chamberlain, that our Bible has checked and blighted all other national inspiration: in his book "The Soul of America," he even calls upon me to repudiate unequivocally "the claim to spiritual supremacy over all the peoples ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill

... to me from all over, begging me to do their houses. And if the women are cross and ugly I'll make everything pink to cheer them up and if they're smug and conceited I'll make their houses dull gray, and if they are too frivolous I'll make things a spiritual blue. Oh, it will be fun! And I want to go to Paris to study just as soon as I get through college, and I don't want to get married for a ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... Human Life.—In addition to its physical nature, human life has within it a spiritual law, or principle, which enables the individual to respond to suitable stimulations and by that means develop into an intelligent and moral being. When, for instance, waves of light from an external object stimulate the nervous system through the ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education

... and when he resumed the Government in 1804, she became the dispenser of much patronage, and sole secretary of state for the department of Treasury banquets. Not having seen the lady until late in her life, when she was fired with spiritual ambition, I can hardly fancy that she could have performed her political duties in the saloons of the Minister with much of feminine sweetness and patience. I am told, however, that she managed matters very well indeed: perhaps ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake

... appointments. In one instance, (see page 549,) we find "Sir alias Mr. John Macbrair," from an uncertainty as to his proper designation. On the institution of the College of Justice, one half of the Judges belonged to the spiritual side; and at the first Sederunt, 27th May 1532, when their names and titles are specified, the churchmen have, with one exception, Magister prefixed to their names,—the exception being Dominus Joannes Dingwell, Provost of Trinity College, near Edinburgh. It cannot ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox

... tear him piecemeal, and devour him, or by gentle beings, disposed to cherish him with fond hospitality." Both writers have expressed themselves well, but meseems each has secured, as often happens, a fragment of the truth and holds it to be the whole Truth. Granted that such spiritual creatures as Jinns walk the earth, we are pleased to find them so very human, as wise and as foolish in word and deed as ourselves: similarly we admire in a landscape natural forms like those of Staffa or the Palisades ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... a time in the history of the world when so many people were striving after definite knowledge,—some scheme of mentality, some mental atmosphere,—some spiritual or idealistic phenomena,—which would satisfy the craving, the hunger of the restless and dissatisfied human mind for absolute enlightenment regarding the mysteries of life. It is a curious fact that to attain such knowledge, all these various bodies, no matter how they may differ as ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... face, marked by a more spiritual grace, I find written Requiescat. None who ever knew them will forget that bright and pure beauty, those eyes of strange, supernatural light, that voice which thrilled and vibrated with an unearthly charm. All who were his contemporaries remember that dauntless courage, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... in their yellow robes, draped like Roman Togas, come and go just like other people; they are greatly reverenced, they teach all the boys of the nation their faith, reading, writing and simple arithmetic, but they do not proselytise or assume spiritual powers, nor do they act in civil affairs, and they "judge not;" they live, or try to live a good life, and to work out each his own salvation, and you may follow their example if you please, but they won't burn you if you do differently or ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... far from me! And when I felt a second self under my heart, I then loved with redoubled warmth the distant one whom I had not seen for years; and when Ivan was born, it seemed to me that the eyes of my lover looked at me through his, and blessed my son whose spiritual father he was! And, my child, what think you gave me the courage to overthrow Biron and assume the regency? Ah, it was only that I might have the power to recall Lynar to my side! I would and must be regent, that I might demand the return of Lynar as ambassador ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach

... of the old world seems to have gone wild—Oscar Wilde! How the Oscars have thriven there since the first of them went to jail!—a degenerate dynasty!—hiding the stench of spiritual rot with the perfume of faultless rhetoric, speaking the unspeakable with the tongues of angels and of prophets! And mostly, my boy, they have thriven on the dollars of American women under the leadership of modern culture. And, you know, the ...
— 'Charge It' - Keeping Up With Harry • Irving Bacheller

... of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... not believe it. As for your temperate diet and milk bringing about such a metamorphosis, I hold it impossible. I have such lamentable proofs every day before my eyes of the stupefying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture. Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino! I shudder ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... dismayed at the prospect of so great a change; but now, after three years of renewed experience of England, I find how incomparably superior is civilised life, where feelings, tastes, and intellect find abundant nourishment, to the spiritual sterility of half-savage existence, even though it be passed in the garden of Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised nation, than in equatorial South America, where three ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... the whole Bible is a millstone about the neck of Christianity,[8] and that the Bible contains much that cannot be regarded as revelation.[9] Even as early as 1835 these opinions were generally accepted by Unitarians; and they were not thought to impair the true worth of the spiritual revelation contained in the Bible, and especially not the divine nature of the teachings of Christ. It was very important, as Dr. Joseph Henry Allen has said, in speaking of Norton and Noyes, that "these decisive first steps were taken by deliberate, ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke

... a beautiful illustration of this doctrine in the case of Sabbath-school teachers, and one reason why persons so engaged usually love their work, is the benefit which they find in it for themselves. I speak here, not of the spiritual, but of the intellectual benefit. By the process of teaching others, they are all the while learning. This advantage in their case is all the greater, because it advances them in a kind of knowledge in which, more than in any other kind of knowledge, men are wont to become passive ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... that they are purificatory in intention, the fire being designed not, as I formerly held, to reinforce the sun's light and heat by sympathetic magic, but merely to burn or repel the noxious things, whether conceived as material or spiritual, which threaten the life of man, of animals, and of plants. This aspect of the fire-festivals had not wholly escaped me in former editions; I pointed it out explicitly, but, biassed perhaps by the great authority of Mannhardt, I treated ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... do not cease to pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold

... inveterate prejudice the result, like the soul-less woman of Al-Islam, of ad captandum, pious fraud. "No soul knoweth what joy of the eyes is reserved for the good in recompense for their works" (Koran xxxn. 17) is surely as "spiritual" as St. Paul (I Cor. ii., 9). Some lies, however are very long-lived, especially ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... cause of her sadness, he tenderly undertook to cure his wife's mental disorder. He avoided speaking of his artistic interests in her presence; he discovered terrible defects in the fair ladies who sought him as a portrait painter; he praised Josephina's spiritual beauty; he painted pictures of her, putting her features on the canvas, but ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... Never allow your mind to dwell on your own misconduct: that is ruin. The conscience has morbid sensibilities; it must be employed but not indulged, like the imagination or the stomach. (2) Let each stab suffice for the occasion; to play with this spiritual pain turns to penance; and a person easily learns to feel good by dallying with the consciousness of having done wrong. (3) Shut your eyes hard against the recollection of your sins. Do not be afraid, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and permanent interest. Most of the vexations of travel I have eliminated, as these lose their force once they have gone over into yesterday. What remains is the beauty of scenery, the grandeur of architecture, the spiritual quality of famous paintings and statues, the ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch

... to the service, sitting upright and very still. The spiritual significance of the music, the massing of foliage and flowers in the chancel, the white altars with their many lighted candles, were very impressive to ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates

... prayed for as well as worked for, and consecrated to the highest uses. Last but not least, power thus developed over a large surface may be applied to athletic contests in the field, and victories here are valuable as fore-gleams of how sweet the glory of achievements in higher moral and spiritual tasks will ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... a tendency to Pantheism in that form of it which associates God necessarily with the universe, but does not utterly confound them. His fixing upon "air" as the primal element, seems an effort to reconcile, in some apparently intermediate substance, the opposite qualities of corporeal and spiritual natures. Air is invisible, impalpable, all-penetrating, and yet in some manner appreciable to sense. May not the vital transformations of this element have produced all the rest? The writer of the Article on Anaximenes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica tells ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... superior. Its graduates go forth fitted for life's true work. The education they have received has been admirably adapted to form both mind and heart. It has had the social, intellectual and spiritual elements in due proportion.... I have sent six daughters to Abbot Academy and do not fear to compare the result as seen in their training, with the results attained in any other institution of our land, provided the persons selected are of equal natural gifts. The ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various

... Pether. Sir, I have the honor of introducing you to my curate and coadjutor, the Reverend Pether M'Clatchaghan, and to myself, his excellent friend, but spiritual superior, the Reverend Edward Deleery, Roman Catholic Rector of this highly respectable and extensive parish; and I have further the pleasure," he continued, taking up Andy Morrow's Punch, "of drinking your very ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton

... expectation had replaced their usual listless apathy. I heard the voice of Gaspar Ruiz shouting inside, but the words I could not make out plainly. I suppose that to see him with his arms free augmented the influence of his strength: I mean by this, the spiritual influence that with ignorant people attaches to an exceptional degree of bodily vigour. In fact, he was no more to be feared than before, on account of the numbness of his arms and hands, ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad

... boys might be seen within, storing up fruit for the winter. Every day added some new grace to the child; but those who were experienced in such matters, mostly mothers who had lost children, said she was dying. Her bloom was too unearthly, her eye too spiritual to last. She was no longer able to run to the woods and fields: a walk to the little summer house at the end of the vicar's garden, only a stone's throw from the door, was sufficient to make her very weary. Nor could she visit the chapel unless carried thither, which was a source of ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... never understand the gratitude and loyalty I bear you. You don't know what a boon it is to be taken up by a man that stands on the pinnacle of civilisation; you can't think how it's refined and purified me, how it's appealed to my spiritual nature; and I want to tell you that I would die at your door ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Cranmer,[4] all extremely err, In taking such a low-bred view Of what Lords Spiritual ought to do:— All owing to the fact, poor men, That Mother Church was modest then, Nor knew what golden eggs her goose, The Public, would in time produce. One Pisgah peep at modern Durham To far more lordly ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... population, than the fact that, at the present day, she is still a powerful and unexhausted country, and her children still, to a certain extent, a high-minded and great people. Yes, notwithstanding the misrule of the brutal and sensual Austrian, the doting Bourbon, and, above all, the spiritual tyranny of the court of Rome, Spain can still maintain her own, fight her own combat, and Spaniards are not yet fanatic slaves and crouching beggars. This is saying much, very much: she has undergone ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... pedant. "I am ill at these numbers"; those in which I have sought to become an expert are numbers of another sort; but having, from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business and found in it the chief spiritual delight of my whole life, I can hardly think myself less qualified than another to offer an opinion on the metrical points ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the table in the house of another fugitive, where the wedding took place—and told him of his manly duty therewith, if need were, to defend the life and liberty of Ellen. I gave them both a Bible, which I had bought for the purpose, to be a symbol of their spiritual culture and a help for their soul, as the sword was for their bodily life. "With this sword I thee wed," suited ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... that the undisclosed portion of any narrative conformed to the exigencies of artistic symmetry and picturesque effect. She set the story of Phillida's sacrifice before her now in one and now in another light, and found in contemplating it much exhilaration—spiritual joy and gratitude in her phraseology. How charmingly it ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... together, and we shall discover the precious pearl of peace and unity; and then let us join hands together in cultivating and cleansing the garden of the Lord, which is overgrown with weeds." There are blessed signs that the Holy Spirit is deepening the spiritual life of widely separated brothers. Historical Churches are feeling the pulsation of a new life from the Incarnate God. All Christian folk see that the Holy Spirit has passed over these human barriers and set His seal to the labors of separated brethren ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... first coming to her that Florence seems to have listened to his prophecy, when, in August 1490, in S. Marco he began to preach on the Revelation of St. John the Divine. It was a programme half political, half spiritual, that he suggested to those who heard him, the reformation of the Church and the fear of a God who had been forgotten but who would not forget. In the spring of the year following, so great were the crowds who flocked to hear his half-political discourses ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton

... false pretence Of spiritual pride and pampered sense, A voice saith, 'What is that to thee? Be true ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... deeds, always accompanied by spiritual encouragement, were done with a beautiful naivete. Such a life was all the more meritorious because the abbe was possessed of an erudition that was vast and varied, and of great and precious faculties. Delicacy and grace, the inseparable ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac

... is not rendered to the State, but to himself and his own class." Or this: "I think editors, journalists, old gentlemen and women will be brutalised [by the War] in larger numbers than our soldiers." Or this: "This is at once a spiritual link with America and yet one of the great barriers to friendship between the two peoples. We are not sure whether we are better men than Americans." Or this: "My mind is open, and when one says that, one generally means that it is shut." Disconcerting, very, and all ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various

... pursuing an unaccustomed labor. Her spirit seemed more happy and joyous than ever. She seemed far more at home than in the midst of crowded streets and gay, brilliant rooms. Her expression was more earnest and spiritual than ever,—her life, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... quantities of rich and indigestible food is not the noblest method of commemorating the day. The rules and laws of digestion are not abrogated upon the Holy day. These are material cautions, the day has a spiritual significance of which material manifestations are, or ought to be, outward ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... too deep for words. By it he divined something of what Lassiter's revelation meant to Bess, but he knew he could only faintly understand. That moment when she seemed to be lifted by some spiritual transfiguration was the most beautiful moment of his life. She stood with parted, quivering lips, with hands tightly clasping the locket to her heaving breast. A new conscious pride of worth dignified the old wild, free ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... of its coast towns, notably in Marsilia, the rich remains of Greek settlements, something of Moorish influence in race and language, and fusing all these heterogeneous elements into a splendid whole. But why this important spiritual centre should have been formed just here it is ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka

... take them with their double edge of truth, then. Holding ourselves always poor, in sight of the infinite spiritual riches of the kingdom. Blessed are the poor, who can feel, even in the keenest earthly joy, how there is a fullness of life laid up in Him who gives it, of whose depth the best gladness here is but a glimpse and foretaste! ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... Spaniard's failing in dealing with a subject race a certain hardness arising from a position of authority not allied with responsibility—except to God, and that, indeed, the Father felt, but he conceived that his duty to his Indians, apart from his spiritual ministrations, was entirely comprised in the teaching, feeding, ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase

... of superior excellence everywhere met his eye. Its statues, its public monuments, and its temples, were models alike of tasteful design and of beautiful workmanship. But there may be much intellectual culture where there is no spiritual enlightenment, and Athens, though so far advanced in civilisation and refinement, was one of the high places of pagan superstition. Amidst the splendour of its architectural decorations, as well as surrounded with proofs of its scientific and literary eminence, the apostle mourned ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... he felt his courage oozing out at the tips of his fingers, like Bob Acres, but in the moment of peril he was himself again. In dreams he was a coward, because, as he argues, the natural man is a poltroon, and conscience, honour, all the spiritual and commanding part of our nature, goes to sleep in dreams. The animal terror asserts itself unchecked. It is a theory not without exceptions. In dreams one has plenty of conscience (at least that ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... which God distinguishes man from the beasts, viz., in those faculties and principles of nature, whereby he is capable of moral agency. Herein very much consists the natural image of God; as His spiritual and moral image, wherein man was made at first, consisted in that moral excellency, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various

... rejection of the principle of democracy and a substitution of the principle of autocracy as asserted in the name, but without the authority and sanction, of the multitude. This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail. It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... them out. Where else, indeed, could the friendless infant have found sponsors? It was disgraceful, they remarked, that the custom of baptism at three days old should have been violated. While they answered for Mini's spiritual development he was quiet, neither crying nor smiling till the old priest crossed his brow. Then he smiled, and that, Bonhomme Hamel ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson

... also of dialectic, or, in modern phraseology, of metaphysics and logic (Theaet., Soph.). Like Plato, he is struggling after something wider and deeper than satisfied the contemporary Pythagoreans. And Plato with a true instinct recognizes him as his spiritual father, whom he 'revered and honoured more than all other philosophers together.' He may be supposed to have thought more than he said, or was able to express. And, although he could not, as a matter of fact, have criticized the ideas of Plato without ...
— Parmenides • Plato

... was admitted by all divines of the Anglican communion and by the most illustrious Nonconformists. It is notorious that the penal laws against Popery were strenuously defended by many who thought Arianism, Quakerism, and Judaism more dangerous, in a spiritual point of view, than Popery, and who yet showed no disposition to enact similar laws against ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... a boy does not give in, he will find his moral courage increasing with each moral fight. Just let that thought stay in your mind, underscored in bold-faced italics, and printed in indelible ink; and if you have a tendency to be a spiritual "jelly-back," it will be like a rod of steel to ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... they miss the very thing that they seek. All that is pleasureable in sex-contact that reaches any man or woman who is only sense-conscious is no more than a faint echo of the ecstacy of divine and perfect love which is known to the spiritual alchemist, who has discovered the art of transmutation and thus found the key to the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad

... His mirth floats eerily down chill corridors; His sigh—it is a sound that loves a keyhole; His tenderness a faint court-tarnished thing; His wisdom prates as from a wicker cage; His very belly is a pompous nought; His eye a page that hath forgot his errand. Yet in his brain—his spiritual brain— Lies hid a child's demure, small, silver whistle Which, to his horror, God blows, unawares, And sets men staring. It is sad to think, Might he but don indeed thin flesh and blood, And pace important to Law's inmost room, He would see, much marvelling, one immensely ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare

... piles, or to have crowded the bursting vaults with accumulated silver, but to have conferred, by the sovereign touch of scientific invention, flexibility, grace, variety of use, an almost ethereal and spiritual virtue, on the stubbornest of common metals. The indications of physical achievement in the future, thus inaugurated, outrun the compass of ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley

... Golly. The heroic girl saw his purpose in his eye—an eye at once black, murderous, and Christian-like. For an instant she thought it was better to succumb at once and thus end this remarkable attachment. Suddenly through this chaos of Spiritual, Religious, Ecstatic, Super-Egotistic whirl of confused thought, darted a gleam of Common, Ordinary Horse Sense! John Gale saw it illumine her blue eyes, and trembled. God in Mercy! If it came ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte

... troubled at the thought of some of the antiquated forms of that grand and complicated ceremony—for instance, the homage of the Peers, spiritual and temporal. As the rule stood, they were all required after kneeling to her, and pledging their allegiance, to rise and kiss her on the left cheek. She might be able to bear up under the salutes of those holy old gentlemen, ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... lifted up their voices to God in prayer, with a heartiness which might be sought for in vain within the lofty walls of many a proud building. Such is the spiritual worship in which God the Spirit alone has pleasure. The party on that wave-tossed raft rose from their knees greatly refreshed in spirit, and sat down to enjoy their morning meal with hearts grateful that they had food sufficient to sustain ...
— Adrift in a Boat • W.H.G. Kingston

... desires, and even in the dullest minds there ran the intoxicating sense of Victory, of an England greater and more powerful than even her own sons and daughters had dared to dream—an England which knew herself now, by the stern test of the four years' struggle, to be possessed of powers and resources, spiritual, mental, physical, which amazed herself. In all conscious minds, brooding on the approaching time, there rose the question: "What are we going to do with it?" and even in the unconscious, the same thought was present, ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... century B.C. the warrior clans rose in revolt against priestly arrogance: and Hindustan witnessed a conflict between the religious and secular arms. Brahminism had the terrors of hell fire on its side; feminine influence was its secret ally; the world is governed by brains, not muscles; and spiritual authority can defy the mailed fist. After a prolonged struggle the Kshatriyas were ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea

... to my great surprise, for I was too sleepy to notice it on going to bed, I found a gun standing ready loaded on one side of the bed, in curious contrast to the crucifix and holy-water pot on the other,—succour close at hand against both spiritual and mortal foes. We had walked through the country without any alarm, and concluded that the reign of the rifle and stiletto was ended in Corsica. But how came the gun to be loaded? was it from inveterate habit even now that fire-arms were proscribed, or was Louis Napoleon's ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... general public, and particularly by those who know nothing practically about the subject, but have reached their opinions by their own inner consciousness and without troubling themselves to investigate the facts. That it does apply, however, to much of what is known as spiritual manifestations there can be no doubt. Of frauds under the name of mediums there has been an abundance. Of dupes under the name of Spiritualists there has been an equal abundance. And the tricks of false mediums have ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... argument in the shape of Higher Criticism, research, blue-books, statistics, cheap publications, free libraries, accessible information, public lectures, and goodness only knows what else, the fighting forces of the spiritual and temporal decencies lie drowsing as in a club-room, placarded "Religion and politics must not ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... religion became centered upon the monks themselves, and he undertook by crafty means to annoy them. Men said these Christian priests were good; that their lives were spent in prayer, in meditation, and in works of charity among the poor; tales came to the Moor of their spiritual existence, of their fleshly renunciation; but at these he scoffed. ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach

... sorrows, which he must bring single-handed and alone to God his Father, as it is written, 'The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy.' There is a world, a flesh, and a devil, near to us, ready to drag us down, and destroy our personal and spiritual life, which God has given us in Christ; a flesh which tempts us to follow our own appetites and passions, blindly and lawlessly, like the beasts which perish; a world which tempts us to become mere things, without free-wills of our own, or consciences of our own, without personal faith ...
— Sermons for the Times • Charles Kingsley

... denominations, as nuns of those monastic communities which escaped the storms of the revolution. Many of them are in the prime of life, and though not bound by absolute vows, devote the whole of their time, and even die in the act of doing good. In spiritual matters, they are under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the district in which the hospital is situated; in temporal concerns they are subject to the authority of the heads of the establishment to which they belong; but they are chiefly ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various

... despiser of the vesture of things, to him the man with the spiritual inner eye, whose philosophy was hated and feared because of its subtle denial of the God in high heaven, to Baruch Mendoza the universe had seemed empty with an emptiness from which glared no divine Judge—his own people's Jahveh—no benignant sufferer appeared ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... spiritual binder holds the people of the United States together, Mr. Parker?" Don ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... of horses and arms and a concourse of soldiers, while a marriage is solemnized in another way, namely, the array of the bridegroom and bride and the gathering of their kindred. Now a vow is a promise made to God: wherefore, the solemnization of a vow consists in something spiritual pertaining to God; i.e. in some spiritual blessing or consecration which, in accordance with the institution of the apostles, is given when a man makes profession of observing a certain rule, in the second degree after the reception of holy orders, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... other veins, but for certain tricks of speech, it is almost impossible to recognise him for the same man. The secular vigour of the Hesperides, the spiritual vigour of the Noble Numbers, has rarely been equalled and never surpassed by any other writer. I cannot agree with Mr. Gosse that Herrick is in any sense "a Pagan." They had in his day shaken off the merely ascetic temper of the Middle Ages, and had not taken upon them ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... humbly dedicated with supreme reverence to the great sages of India, who, for the first time in history, formulated the true principles of freedom and devoted themselves to the holy quest of truth and the final assessment and discovery of the ultimate spiritual essence of man through their concrete lives, critical thought, dominant ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... at Vidin there are one hundred and twelve books on scientific and literary matters. The Pasha was venerated and was regarded almost with dread for having managed to assemble so many volumes dealing with other than spiritual affairs. ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... branch of the Ismaili stock was established by Hassan, son of Sabah, in the mountainous districts of Northern Persia; and, before their suppression by the Mongols, 170 years later, the power of the quasi-spiritual dynasty which Hassan founded had spread over the Eastern Kohistan, at least as far as Kain. Their headquarters were at Alamut ("Eagle's Nest"), about 32 miles north-east of Kazwin, and all over the territory which they held they established fortresses of great strength. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... years have in some measure removed this absurdity, by destroying the old convention that it was middle-class to be sane, and that between the artist and the outer-world yawned a gulf which few could cross. Modern artists are beginning to realize their social duties. They are the spiritual teachers of the world, and for their teaching to have weight, it must be comprehensible. Any attempt, therefore, to bring artist and public into sympathy, to enable the latter to understand the ideals of the ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... of God's bounty, engendering those spiritual tastes in men, philosophers and learned men, wise in their own conceit, obstinately shut their eyes to it, and look afar off for what is really close to them, so that they incur the penalty of being "branded on the nostrils" [Kuran, lxviii. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... and social advantage. When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize, to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found together in the rites and constructions of religion. They like to make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... that we spent at Netley, the last few moments of which were made full of hopeful thoughts by the passing away of the visible clouds from the visible sky, I could not but reflect upon the glorious stability of things spiritual, contrasted with the mutability and evanescence of things temporal. Our hearts, which are united by real bonds—the love of truth, the fear of God, and the desire of duty—have remained so united through all these years of ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place, woman, the slave of the slave, had even less. Her wage had never been fixed. That she had right to one had entered no imagination. To the end of Greek civilization ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche

... must either deny these facts or admit that they must have had an intellectual and spiritual cause of the psychic order, and I recommend sceptics who do not desire to be convinced, to deny them outright; to treat them as illusions and cases of a fortuitous coincidence of circumstances. They will find this easier. Uncompromising deniers of facts, rebels against evidence, may be ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... nervous exhaustion with which I struggled for years, traces of it remaining long after Hull-House was opened in 1889. At the best it allowed me but a limited amount of energy, so that doubtless there was much nervous depression at the foundation of the spiritual struggles which this chapter is forced to record. However, it could not have been all due to my health, for as my wise little notebook sententiously remarked, "In his own way each man must struggle, lest the moral law become a far-off ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... substitute for the abasements and humiliations of faith. And with that sense of dignity went reserve—the intimate conviction that no feeling which is talked about, which can be observed and handled and measured by other people, is worth a rush. It was what seemed to her the spiritual intrusiveness of Catholicism, its perpetual uncovering of the soul—its disrespect for the secrets of personality—its humiliation of the will—that made it most odious in the eyes of this daughter of a modern world, ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the program—that you can test a modern community by the degree of its interest in its Young Men's Christian Association. You can test whether it knows what road it wants to travel or not. You can test whether it is deeply interested in the spiritual and essential prosperity of its rising generation. I know of no test that can be more conclusively put to ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... people. He explained that Spanish explorers found these Hopis in 1540, long before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, and called the country Tusayan. Then he went on to describe a remarkable meeting that had been held in which the Indians had manifested deep interest in spiritual things, and had asked many curious questions about life, death ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... worketh for a useful end I know. But he, who for the klip-klap never heareth The call of bells to feeling's holiday— Hath but sham-life, mechanically moving, Soul-less he is, unconscious and unloving. Fly agile arrow, rattling in thy speeding Over the busy emmet's roof of clay, And waken spiritual life! ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer



Words linked to "Spiritual" :   religious song, sacred, incorporeal, unworldly, spirit, immaterial, supernatural



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